On 5 October, ISO/TC 59's Advisory Group met at the offices of AENOR in Madrid. Five subcommittees and eight working groups also took the opportunity to meet in conjunction with the Advisory Group, among them the new subcommittee on construction procurement and the new working group on modular coordination.
ISO/TC 59's Advisory Group, which consists of all the subcommittee secretaries and chairs, the TC leadership and the leadership of any working groups directly under ISO/TC 59, meets once a year to discuss technical and strategic issues as well as the road ahead for ISO/TC 59. This group also deals with any overarching matters across the subcommittees and coordinates the work among them as appropriate. In Madrid, the Advisory Group opened the show, and then the rest of the week was filled with working group and subcommittee plenary meetings.
Inaugural meeting for new subcommittee
The new subcommittee on construction procurement, SC 18, had its very first meeting in Madrid. In addition to SC 18's South African leadership, delegates from South Africa, Japan, China, Norway, and the UK attended the meeting. The subcommittee scope was further elaborated and agreed upon and this led to the establishment of two working groups: WG 1 "Maintenance of ISO 10845 series" and WG 2 "Procurement strategy and tactics". The working groups will be convened by Alain Jacquet (South Africa) and Will Hughes (UK) respectively. (See also news item on the on-going systematic review of the ISO 10845 series.)
Revision project started
Another inaugural meeting was that of ISO/TC 59/WG 3 "Modular coordination". This working group is led from China by Suwei Wei, a Director Engineer at the China Institute of Building Standard Design & Research. The newly established working group will be revising a number of standards on modular coordination and tolerances that have previously been the direct responsibility of ISO/TC 59, as they were initially developed by subcommittees under ISO/TC 59 that have since been disbanded. Many of these standards are fairly short, but nonetheless important, and the revision project in WG 3 will now give the opportunity to update and merge them all into one standard, which will be a lot more user-friendly. China has strong interests in modular coordination, as this is a technique widely used in the Chinese construction industry. The attendees at this first meeting came from China, Japan, Ecuador, Norway and South Africa.
Great interest in accessibility
In 2011, SC 16 "Accessibility and usability of the built environment" and its WG 1 with the same name published ISO 21542 Building construction - Accessibility and usability of the built environment, a very important standard that provides requirements and recommendations related to constructional aspects of access to buildings and aspects of accessibility management in buildings. Since the publication, the committee has had no physical meetings, but it has continuously monitored and assessed the need for a revision of the standard. As ISO 21542 will now come up for systematic review in 2016, both SC 16 and WG 1 decided to meet in Madrid. Both meetings attracted great interest, and over 20 delegates and representatives from SC 16's member bodies and liaisons attended.
Delegates and liaison representatives at the SC 16 plenary meeting